Since the founding of the company, Alphabet (previously Google’s) founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hosted all-company gatherings every Friday afternoon during which a ask-anything ethos ruled. Sundar Pichai, who took over the reins, on why he unexpectedly changed ‘TGIF’ and what it means to the company’s culture of openness:
We are going to continue having TGIF, and we will always make changes to TGIF. Most employees, when they come into Google from the outside, regardless of the level they come in, they get blown away by the level of transparency within the company. Those are all cherished traditions of the company. It is just that when the company is over 100,000 people, at what unit levels do you kind of do those things? At their scale TGIF had definitely gotten harder. Transparency without context is also not easy. When you have 1,000 people, everybody has shared context for what the decisions are. To try to do this at 100,000 people doesn’t always work in that centralized form. So those are the nuances of it. And so it’s something we are going to play with and evolve and continue. But we’ll work through it as a company. We always have.